Would I Recommend Using A Service Like @Upvotebank?
Hey there Steemians,
I guess it is a common theme on this platform, for people to want to maximize their stake in our community.
Some people like to do that with as little effort as possible (maybe they are on vacation, or in a busy time of the year), so I won't judge that.
I went ahead and tested the @upvotebank service for 3 weeks now, while also manually curating content (I wouldn't suggest you doing that if you plan to manually curate on the side, as it will just drain your precious VP, that could help someone else, who deserves it more).
And this is the issue that I have with this service especially,
they make it seem like you are giving away your votepower for a good cause. I mean it is still better than not voting at all, but they need to be more transparent about what is going on with the distribution of the voting.
I have checked every day, and not once have I voted for any other account than @upvotebank or @minimalpris.
Why not distribute the votes amongst all the users, rather than selfishly using it for promoting lazy ass automated content like from @minimalpris?
So then, I went ahead to check whether it is only for me, or would they do that deliberately for everyone of their services users?
Yes, looks like everyone who uses this sevice is targeting the same few accounts with his votepower, that is advertised to help a broader range of content-creators and obviously yourself.
Because I didn't know at that point, if this was really a deliberate attempt at growing @minimalpris account through falsely advertising this service, or if he really was involved with the project, I tried to dig a little deeper, aaaand would you look at that?!
Here is a little excerpt of the services description:
Every steemian on the steem block chain, can give up to 10 full upvotes every day. But many do not use the platforms every day, which means upvotes gets lost.
With UpvoteBank you can put your upvotes in our bank, and the next time you make a post, you will get upvoted with the upvotes you have saved up….
okay, what really happens is that we use your un-used upvotes to upvote others, and when you make a post we use there un-used upvotes to upvote you with the amount you have saved up. We will only use your vote if your voting power is above 90%!!
Others...Others...That is a broad word, isn't it? Does your own account count towards the defintion of "Others" if you write the text? I am not too sure about that. Or atleast it should be advertised for anyone using this service...
But then I got really mad, when I saw that this garbage of a votesharing service, isn't even giving me the amount of vote advertised in their daily report. Have a look!
The first line is from yesterday's report, indicating that my votepower has been saved up to roughly 16$cents in the "upvotebank", while receiving 0.016$ in votes for the last 24 hours.
The next line is for today's report, where my saved up votes, just magically disappeared, without me ever receiving any votes in that range of 0.16$.
I have double-checked this and only received around 0.04$ from different people in the last 24 hours (so, yes I know that I can't really tell if a vote is coming from the pool of upvotebank or just a random follower/steem user not associated with @upvotebank), but if the value of 0.16$ never gotten to me, I can surely tell that this service isn't even workign as it is supposed to be.
Many many red flags and selfish, untransparent behaviour, that I'm wondering how this "service" could exist for 1,5 years already without anybody noticing?
I'm usually not one, who jumps to quick conclusions and loves to see every possible angle, but with so many obvious flaws and malpractice, I just can't keep this for myself.
To give the person behind @upvotebank the benefit of the doubt, I tried reaching out to them explaining one of the issues (I didn't know about the other issues at that time), and received this answer:
Go to steemworld.com/@kharma.scribbles and look at my 'posting' transactions.. And yes, I noticed the HUGE weight influence toward @minimalpris but it is mentioned on the upvotebank posts that minimalpris runs it.. but they should be excluding themselves from the votes - especially since they are hogging up the votes.
However -- I rarely ever make a full 100% vote, so it is very easy to see on steemworld which votes are from me and which ones are being done from upvotebank (I assume) (( and sometimes yes I do make a few 100% votes but not close together at all)) So many votes were coming out of my account, in fact, that I recently had to raise my min VP from 90% to 95% because I was finding just way too many votes being wasted as dustvotes and not bringing in curation rewards for me (upvotebank often voted before the 15 minute mark - I never would .. )
After changing min VP to 95% I see a much better rate of votes but I was still leary of this service, it's advertising the now defunct 'exit-dice' site and I tagged upvotebank along with those running it and got zero response.. so. Now this post has me thinking even harder!
I find it odd that you only voted on 2 accounts tho... I vote on many via upvotebank and also get very many votes coming in to my posts that I can only assume are coming from upvotebank since it started after I joined there and before I was able to start growing my now tiny network.. Also the rate at which they come in and the 'rushes' come all at the same timestamps.. basically upvotebank seems to have set up curation trails for members, which trigger at certain times depending on our VP and banked vote - that's how I imagine the innerworkings of it, at least somewhat, are made.
What was your min. VP set at?
Hey @kharma.scribbles, thank you for that informative reply!
I agree, it might be mentioned that he is involved with/running the service, but as I have shown in the service's description, he clearly states that upvotes are distributed to OTHER users, which implies that the votes are not used for himself, which is pretty selfish.
I'm just shocked, because I actually love that concept and think that, if done correctly and fair, would bring a lot of positivity to this chain.
So @minimalpris, if you want to team up and work on doing actually something good for everyone, hit me up :P
And yes, it might be easy for your particular case to tell if the vote is genuinely and manually done by you, but I just couldn't tell for everyone. Plus I also agree that there must be a voting trail / or setting, to actually vote within the 15 minute time-frame, so that people receive maximum curation rewards (which isn't a bad thing imho).
To be 100% fair, I can't really tell if I ONLY voted for these accounts as, when I manually curate it often times are random accounts that might only receive one vote, os it is hard to tell from the statistics.
But I'm sure that the frequency voted for @upvotebank and @minimalpris are simply just too high and unfair for everyone else.
My min vp was set at 85% (which might have been too low :P)
I think 85 might have been too low for you.
I was not arguing with you, I want to clarify that - I was tired when I wrote that so I'm sorry if it came off that way.
One thing I am confused about is the 15 minute thing.. I had read that there is a balance you need to achieve but for exampe voting within the first minute means you split your curation 100% with the author! and it scales off to about 50% at the 15-minute mark, so between 15 minutes and 20 is ideal, UNLESS you are the first to vote and the post ends up with a lot of votes - because the bonus for being the first one to find the 'trending' content gets a boost on curation that can make up for early voting.
For example, the tipu bot won't even vote within the first 15 minutes of your post - and steemauto has a vote delay that defaults to 15 minutes (if enabled)..
I'm still new and barely understand it all to be honest. So much different information and now HF21 come to change it all up again! lol
Hey sorry, I didn't want to come off that way, too :D
I think I'm also not the best person to explain the technicality behind the "voting time window", but @acidyo has published a post regarding the best curation techniques (https://steempeak.com/curation/@acidyo/curation-tips) and he also mentions that @jga knows all the technical stuff behind it.
I think we are in the same boat, I'm also not fully understanding how it works and yeah now it will all change again anyways :D
But how I understood it that after the HF21 change it will be most profitable for curators, to vote after 5 minutes instead of 15 ;)
Yes, that is what I heard too!
I'm rather optimistic about HF21, there is a lot of negativity around it but I think people are jumping the gun because they can't know if it will be bad until it gets here tomorrow... It can't be that bad I doubt Steemit would do something to jeopardize the platform.
We shall see. :)
Nice post! Damn you are on point! I used Upvotebank to store likes this week because I'm on business travel Monday-Wednesday and then Thursday to Saturday again. Good that you made the fact check, I was wondering about that anyway.
Hey thank you for your kind words :)
And also thanks for resteeming, I guess the more people know the better!
Yeah, I had some suspicions, but wanted to make sure before posting.
I really believe that a service like that, if done correctly and fair, would be a great thing. Especially when you need to travel or are on vacation.
Enjoy the business trip ;)
Hab früher auch solche Services genutzt, musste nur sau viele Nutzer blocken (blacklisten auf dem jeweiligen Service) da sonst eben so etwas passiert. (Kaufen meist immer die gleichen Leute Votes)
Außerdem hab ich viele geblacklisted weil sie einfach Mist gepostet gepusht haben..^^
Mittlerweile kann ich eher empfehlen ein paar Auto-Votes täglich einzustellen ( zum Beispiel direkt täglich an @investinthefutur :P und @nosdos :) gibt noch viele andere geniale Projekte, kannst auch Autovotes für deine Lieblingsblogger einstellen)
Und wenn unbedingt Votes verkaufen, dann an @tipu ist n echt cooler Service und auch mit der profitabelste. ;)
https://www.steemprofit.info/ aktuell 20,3% APR
https://tipu.online/investors_data Reinvest in Tokens einstellen und Token für 1,3-1,4 Steem pro Token auf Steem-Engine verkaufen (sind mit 1,1 Steem pro Token gesichert - aber Nachfrage war die letzte Zeit recht hoch ^^)
https://steem-engine.com
Ja verstehe ich schon, nur dass bei diesem Service eben damit geworben wird, dass die Votes for free umverteilt werden, also nichts mit Votes kaufen.
Und unter der Prämisse, grenzt das angesprochene Projekt dann schon sehr stark an Betrug, vor allem wenn man die Leute eben in dem glauben lässt, die Votes werden auf alle User verteilt, und nicht NUR auf denjenigen der die Seite verwaltet :D
Interessant, habe viele respektable Leute schon den Service von @tipu nutzen sehen und mich immer gefragt, ob sich das lohnt.
Meinst du, du könntest mir über Discord ein bisschen mehr darüber erzählen? :)
Frieden ist Krieg. Freiheit ist Sklaverei. Nichts ist wie es scheint. Vor allem nicht hier auf der Steem Blockchain.
Zum Glück wurde Transparenz in das Base-Layer codiert. ;)
What is your opinion on this service, have you been using it in the past or are you using it currently?
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Actually an easier way is if you could go to my steemworld.com/kharma.scribbles, and filter/refresh for my upcoming curation rewards.. there it shows weight and the post age at vote.. Before changing my VP to a higher number I had WAY more on that list but it's still quite a bit that goes out.
I just checked that for me and it seems to be even worse than I thought, Every single vote for @minimalpris account is exactly done after 1 day, that means that I won't even receive the benefit of early vote and max curation...
Pretty f**** up :D